Abstract
Previous research suggests that closing one’s eyes or averting one’s gaze from another person can benefit visual-spatial imagination by interrupting cognitive demands associated with face-to-face interaction (Markson and Paterson, 2009). The present study further investigated this influence of social gaze on adults’ visual-spatial imagination, using the matrix task (Kerr, 1987, 1993). Participants mentally kept track of a pathway through an imaginary 2-dimensional (2D) or 3-dimensional (3D) matrix. Concurrent with this task, participants either kept their eyes closed or maintained eye contact with another person, mutual gaze with a person whose eyes were obscured (by wearing dark glasses), or unreciprocated gaze toward the face of a person whose own gaze was averted or whose face was occluded (by placing a paper bag over her head). Performance on the 2D task was poorest in the eye contact condition, and did not differ between the other gaze conditions, which produced ceiling performance. However, the more difficult 3D task revealed clear effects of social gaze. Performance on the 3D task was poorest for eye contact, better for mutual gaze, and equally better still for the unreciprocated gaze and eye-closure conditions. The findings reveal the especially disruptive influence of eye contact on concurrent visual-spatial imagination and a benefit for cognitively demanding tasks of disengaging eye contact during face-to-face interaction.
Highlights
In situations involving interlocutory interactions, people often spontaneously close their eyes or look away from the interlocutor, when asked difficult or probing questions (e.g., Glenberg et al, 1998; Doherty-Sneddon et al, 2002; Doherty-Sneddon and Phelps, 2005)
For the 2D task, performance was poorer for eye contact compared to the other gaze conditions
Performance in the 3D matrix task revealed important differences between social gaze conditions. For this more difficult matrix task, performance was poorest for the eye contact condition, better for mutual gaze, and better still in conditions in which gaze was not reciprocated and so neither eye contact nor mutual gaze was possible
Summary
In situations involving interlocutory interactions, people often spontaneously close their eyes or look away from the interlocutor, when asked difficult or probing questions (e.g., Glenberg et al, 1998; Doherty-Sneddon et al, 2002; Doherty-Sneddon and Phelps, 2005). These showed that performance was poor if, during the retention interval, participants looked at someone’s face or watched a complex visual stimulus, but better if they averted their gaze (by looking at the floor) or closed their eyes Because these tasks included a memory component, it is unclear whether the disruptive influence of distracting visual stimuli is restricted to memory for visualspatial information or can affect concurrent processing of this information. In line with Kerr’s earlier findings (see Fiore et al, 2011), performance was poorer for 3D than 2D matrices, but matrix complexity did not modulate the effects of eye-closure or averted gaze on task performance These experiments provide clear evidence that eye-contact with another person can disrupt visual-spatial imagination. Both 2D and 3D matrices were used in the present research, in order to determine if standard effects of matrix complexity are observed (i.e., performance should be better for 2D than 3D tasks), and to ascertain if the influence of social gaze on the visualization of spatial information varies with matrix complexity
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